00:00Hopefully, none of you have had your fantasy draft yet.
00:03Let's be real.
00:04I know this is where everybody's brain goes.
00:06Whenever there's a major injury, we don't think about the player.
00:10We don't think about the team.
00:11We think about our stupid fantasy rosters.
00:14So, cheers to every one of you who in the 8th, 9th, or 10th round this year
00:18grabbed Jaden Higgins from the Houston Texans
00:22because there have been a lot of camp reports that Jaden's looked really good
00:26and Jaden is going to be that B to Nico Collins A
00:32and that Texans team is going to be healthier this year
00:35and they're going to move the ball a lot better.
00:37So, Jaden Higgins, nice little sneaky pick.
00:40Well, that's a torn ACL in a joint practice yesterday
00:44and I thought of you because yesterday you were,
00:47let's get rid of these stupid joint practices.
00:50Right.
00:51Now, I didn't know if you were being kind of tongue-in-cheek on that
00:54or if you do actually feel like joint practices should go away.
00:58I feel that way.
00:59Okay.
01:00Not tongue-in-cheek.
01:01Like, the idea of Jaden Higgins tearing his ACL, I get it.
01:05It could happen in the first game if you had no joint practices
01:08or it could happen in a preseason game.
01:10Or regular practice.
01:11And I think about just college football, and I said this yesterday,
01:13where college football, you've got, you know, your scrimmages against each other
01:17and then you go out there and you play in week zero or you play in week one
01:21and normally you take on a patsy unless you have one of these big paydays
01:24and you go out and you play football and you're playing football and it matters.
01:28Like, this doesn't matter.
01:30Joint practice, I get it.
01:31You want to develop your callus and you want to have preseason games.
01:34And I think that the preseason games are mainly because the team and the league,
01:38they want to make money.
01:39And if you're a season ticket holder, you have to pay for those games.
01:42And so there's big-time money attached to it,
01:45but the joint practice thing, to me, makes no sense.
01:48Okay.
01:48I want to read something to you.
01:49I really like this guy, Louis Riddick.
01:52Do you follow Louis Riddick at all?
01:54He's phenomenal.
01:55This is a guy who easily could be, has been offered to be a GM in this league,
02:01but is also a media content creator and right now is with
02:04and has been with ESPN for a long time.
02:08And he sent this tweet out yesterday, and I kind of,
02:10I thought it'd be a real good one to enter into our conversation
02:13because I thought that Herm Edwards yesterday was hitting some of the same drums
02:18that Louis Riddick hit at 5 o'clock last night.
02:22Louis wrote, abolish joint practices, abolish preseason games,
02:30abolish minicamp and OTAs, abolish hitting too hard.
02:35Hell, maybe abolish the regular season too,
02:38and just pick the playoff teams based on what they did the year before.
02:43Would that make everyone happy?
02:46I have never heard so much complaining about all caps, everything in my life.
02:54That's the tweet from Louis Riddick.
02:56How does that grab you?
02:57It grabs me that he's being like really, really sarcastic.
03:01For sure.
03:01And I get it.
03:02And like abolish all of it, abolish hitting.
03:05And if you want to go all the way back to like the serious part of it,
03:08which is abolish joint practices and abolish like the preseason games,
03:12okay, I think that if you did that,
03:15the quality of football in the early part of the year would suffer,
03:18but you wouldn't have guys like this,
03:21Jaden Higgins getting hurt in a meaningless joint practice.
03:24So I think that the athletes now have evolved to the point where,
03:28you know, you have these guys going head to head in a joint practice
03:32and injury becomes much more of a likelihood.
03:35Herm Edwards yesterday with us.
03:38Hello?
03:40This is what he said about all of the talk about the preseason being diminished
03:45and going away.
03:46When I started, I'm going to age myself.
03:49There was actually six preseason games.
03:51There was only 14 regular season games.
03:53Yeah, six of them.
03:54Six.
03:55I came to the league 1977 with the Eagles.
03:57There was six preseason games, 14 regular.
03:59Now, here was the deal.
04:00I knew early I was going to be a starter, so Dick Vermeule told me,
04:04he says, hey, look, in the preseason, he says,
04:06you go out there with the vets because you're a starter.
04:08He said, in the second quarter, you ain't leaving the field.
04:10Just stay out there.
04:11Just keep playing.
04:11I've got to get you experience.
04:13And so he was correct because anything else,
04:15these young guys need to learn how to play.
04:17And the only way to do that is through playing.
04:20I mean, you know, I always say this.
04:21It's kind of funny about football players.
04:23You know what they do for a living?
04:24They play football.
04:25I watch half of them now.
04:26They wear baseball hats on the sidelines.
04:28Like, what are you doing?
04:29You're a football player.
04:30It's football time.
04:30And you've got to play football.
04:31That's how you get better when you play football.
04:33All I know is this.
04:34What I witnessed this weekend, I watched, in my opinion,
04:37I watched the best player in football, Josh Allen.
04:40It was like, hey, I'm playing not just one series.
04:44I'm going to play a couple series.
04:45And I said, it's refreshing.
04:47He's a football player.
04:48Go play football.
04:50Stop worrying about getting hurt.
04:51Because as soon as you think you're going to get hurt,
04:53you're getting hurt.
04:54I love it.
04:55And, obviously, Herm is amazingly entertaining with the way he's speaking.
04:59What are you doing?
05:00It's football time.
05:01You're a football player.
05:03Play football.
05:06Look, I think there's two things going on here for the purposes of our conversations.
05:12One, this is something that a lot of people feel right now.
05:16But, two, I think we especially feel it.
05:18And I've talked about this already the last couple of weeks.
05:21And I don't think it's going away.
05:23Hey, I think the 49er fan base right now, some of it runs the risk of being what I would
05:30call a worrywart.
05:33Because we've been, at least in our minds, burned by this.
05:37Just one or 27 too many times.
05:40Dre Greenlaw just trying to run onto the field at the Super Bowl.
05:43Or these metrics that pop up every single day.
05:45Talk about how one of the 49ers and one of the most injured teams in football.
05:49Grandy, I love what you sent out today.
05:51Matt Mayocco put out a list of the teams that have the most people on IR.
05:56Guess what?
05:56A, the 49ers are not at the top.
05:58But B, they are like, I don't know, fourth or fifth place with four people.
06:03You don't even know who the hell three of them are.
06:06You've never, ever heard of them.
06:09They were never going to factor into this season for the 49ers.
06:13It's Ricky Pearsall, end of list.
06:16So, I think that we are overly triggered by this.
06:22You cannot protect these players.
06:25And Lewis and Herm have a point.
06:29Like, the Niners are also going to lose some people for the season this year.
06:33This is how it works.
06:35There is a line where we're going too far with what we want to get rid of and how we
06:41attempt to protect the players out there.
06:43There's a line, but I don't know where you draw that line.
06:47And, you know, every team does it their own way.
06:49And so, Josh Allen wants to play in the first game.
06:52And he plays two series.
06:53And great.
06:53He got sacked a couple times.
06:55And he is 6'5 and 240 or whatever.
06:57And so, maybe he's more likely to endure that.
07:01And so, you look at every team.
07:03They have to go about things in a different way.
07:05I think about Summer League and the NBA, where, like, this year, Will Richard, in his second year, he played
07:11Summer League in Vegas.
07:12And it's like, oh, my God, you played Summer League?
07:14That's almost unheard of.
07:16But he wanted to go out there and play.
07:17And he played seven or eight games.
07:20And Yaxle, the same thing.
07:21But Steph Curry didn't play Summer League.
07:23And, you know, Draymond and Horford and whatever the vets didn't.
07:26And yet, in football, we feel like it's that important that you go out there and play.
07:30And so, every team does it differently.
07:32Secondly, you mentioned before, the Rams, like, the Rams don't play anybody in the preseason.
07:37So, it just depends on who you are and what your personnel is.
07:40I know, but I also just, and I said this to you, I think, at the top of the week,
07:43or maybe it was last week,
07:44the word that I'm just kind of, I don't know, in a way, I'm currently done with it.
07:49Concern.
07:50That's what I used to hear everybody talking about all day, every day.
07:53What are your concerns?
07:55I don't have any with the Niners.
07:58Bad crap's going to happen.
07:59Some good crap's going to happen.
08:01But, like, why would we look at this through this lens of, oh, no.
08:07Like, I have this concern.
08:10Nick Bosa, is he a concern?
08:12He got hurt last year.
08:14He's coming back.
08:14He's on track.
08:15We'll see what happens.
08:17But there's just, there's no way to bubble wrap everybody by continually doing away with things that could lead to
08:27something bad happening.
08:28You can bubble wrap in the preseason.
08:30That's my point.
08:30But not really.
08:32But Bosa won't play in the preseason.
08:34He's practiced, and just as many people tear their ACLs in practice.
08:37Okay.
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